ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Why are population growth rate estimates of past and present hunter-gatherers so different?
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Malaria shaped human spatial organization for the past 74 thousand years.Science advances · 2026Article
- Landscape of fear: indirect effects of conflict can account for large-scale population declines in non-state societies.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Positive feedbacks in deep-time transitions of human populations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- A model of long-term population growth with an application to Central West Argentina.PloS one · 2024Article
- Article
- Changes in limiting factors for forager population dynamics in Europe across the last glacial-interglacial transition.Nature communications · 2022Article
- A manifesto for palaeodemography in the twenty-first century.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Archaeology, demography and life history theory together can help us explain past and present population patterns.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
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Abstract
Hunter-gatherer population growth rate estimates extracted from archaeological proxies and ethnographic data show remarkable differences, as archaeological estimates are orders of magnitude smaller than ethnographic and historical estimates. This could imply that prehistoric hunter-gatherers were demographically different from recent hunter-gatherers. However, we show that the resolution of archaeological human population proxies is not sufficiently high to detect actual population dynamics and growth rates that can be observed in the historical and ethnographic data. We argue that archaeological and ethnographic population growth rates measure different things; therefore, they are not directly comparable. While ethnographic growth rate estimates of hunter-gatherer populations are directly linked to underlying demographic parameters, archaeological estimates track changes in the long-term mean population size, which reflects changes in the environmental productivity that provide the ultimate constraint for forager population growth. We further argue that because of this constraining effect, hunter-gatherer populations cannot exhibit long-term growth independently of increasing environmental productivity. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cross-disciplinary approaches to prehistoric demography'.
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